Bach on the Nineteenth Century Piano

Piano soloist Oliver Moore (from the American Bach Soloists Web page for last night’s recital)

The title of the second of the four concerts prepared for this year’s annual San Francisco Bach Festival presented by American Bach Soloists was Explorations: Bach Beyond Baroque. This was a solo piano recital by guest artist Oliver Moore performed in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. With the exception of the opening selection, the BWV 867 prelude-fugue coupling in B-flat minor from the first Book of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, all of the works on the program were composed during the nineteenth century.

Two of those selections were Bach arrangements by Camille Saint-Saëns and Ferruccio Busoni, respectively. The first of these was the opening Sinfonia for the BWV 29 cantata Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir (we thank you God, we thank you). This was followed by the Chaconne movement that concludes the BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor. These constituted the first half of Moore’s program. The second half was devoted to major piano compositions by Johannes Brahms, his Opus 24 “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,” and Franz Liszt, the “Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H.” Moore concluded with an encore selection, Busoni’s transcription of the BWV 734 organ chorale on Martin Luther’s hymn “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein” (dear Christians, one and all, rejoice).

Taken as a whole, this was an impressively prodigious program of nineteenth-century piano technique at its richest. All of the works demanded the highest of keyboard skills, and it would not surprise me if Busoni had mastered all four of them for his recital performances. In that respect one could almost imagine that Moore was channeling Busoni’s spirit. His intensity definitely did justice to nineteenth century keyboard techniques at their most flamboyant. The Liszt selection was originally composed for organ, but the composer clearly could not resist adding it to the repertoire of his piano recitals.

Nevertheless, I came away from the second half of the program with the feeling that neither Liszt nor the relatively young Brahms were willing to honor the enough-is-enough injunction. Brahms’ Opus 24 clocks in with 25 variations. Each of these is a masterpiece of brevity, but the attentive listener can be forgiven for looking at his watch by the time a dozen of those variations have punched the clock. By the time the fugue takes over, one would be forgiven for wondering just what it was that Brahms wanted to prove. Liszt, on the other hand, saw both the fantasy and the fugue as invitations to go as wild as possible, leaving the listener with the impression that, while he may have been long-winded, Brahms had the clearer account of structure, if not showy-execution.

By the time Moore had concluded his encore, my guess is that most of the audience welcomed the conclusion of the marathon. Nevertheless, he brought a refreshing contrast to the Baroque rhetoric that dominated Thursday night’s program. Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas clearly appreciated that too much of anything has its limits. Thus, one could come away from the two successive programs with the sense of an imaginative approach to contrasting styles.